Jeffrey Barton arrived in Carlsbad in 1995 with a new job and an old secret.

He’d been hired to revitalize the summer program at the Army and Navy Academy, a college-prep boarding school founded in 1910. His background seemed solid, with summer camp experience in Texas, New Hampshire and Hawaii. He was selected over more than 50 other candidates.

What his new bosses didn’t know or failed to find out is that two years earlier he’d been fired from a boys’ boarding school in Tennessee after allegedly fondling one of the eighth-graders.

Over the next 18 years, Barton became a fixture at the oceanfront Carlsbad school. He helped turn the summer program into a moneymaking machine. The president called him “the finest employee at our school.” Eventually he was promoted to a top job, coordinating the academic and residential pursuits of the campus’ 300 cadets.

Through it all, he kept the secret. Colleagues in Carlsbad didn’t even know he’d worked in Tennessee, let alone what he was accused of there. He omitted the school from his résumé. Three years ago, during a deposition in an unrelated civil suit, when he was under oath and asked about his job history, he never mentioned it.

Even if the academy had known about his time in Tennessee and called to check, it’s unclear what officials would have learned. To settle a wrongful-termination suit, the school had agreed not to discuss why Barton left.

The secret is out now. Barton, 55, was arrested Oct. 17 and charged with molesting two students at Army and Navy, one of them more than 50 times over a two-year period — fondling, oral copulation, sodomy — in his office, his cottage, his car and on overnight, school-sanctioned trips. He faces life in prison. He has pleaded not guilty.

While the academy launches an independent investigation into what went wrong, the case raises troubling echoes of recent Catholic Church and Boy Scout scandals, where alleged offenders were allowed to move on to jobs in different places without warning anyone. In her court filings, prosecutor Tracy Prior said Barton’s “pattern of abuse” spans three different decades and three separate boarding schools.

She said six boys were victims, including the one in Tennessee. There was no arrest then because the student’s parents didn’t want to put him through the ordeal of a criminal case, Prior wrote.

She quoted him as saying he feels guilty there was no prosecution in 1993. Maybe then, he said, Barton never would have come to Carlsbad.

Contrasting views

The picture painted of Barton in the court filings — predatory, manipulative, acting like a “jealous girlfriend” while stalking a boy who spurned him — is nothing like the quiet professional image he was able to cultivate among some of his relatives and colleagues.

They describe him as an organized, hardworking, sometimes demanding problem-solver who interacted well with students and parents and was so determined to improve the school he didn’t have much of a life beyond campus.